POST-DESIRE LAND

This winter issue of Flash Art delves into the essence of desire in today’s context, and explores what it means to be an artist in the United States at this moment. With terms like “brat” and “demure” being used to describe various lifestyles, we are prompted to consider what a new understanding of desire might look like. Following Shumon Basar’s concept of “endcore,” which captures the anxiety that social media, alarming news, and tumultuous historical moments have instilled in our society, we ask ourselves: Is desire still something we yearn for?

 

For this issue, we invited artists working in different media to aphorize the idea of desire or anti-desire.

 

Tom Burr, in conversation with Gordon Hall, discusses the origins of his Torrington Project, an endeavor stemming from Burr’s desire to allow works created over the years to share the same space and engage in dialogue with one other, as well as his dissatisfaction with the constraints of the current art system. The project represents a space for rethinking artistic practice. Burr appears on the cover of the winter issue, photographed by David Brandon Geeting in his studio in Torrington, wearing Gucci.

 

On the occasion of their show “It Waives Back” at Fondazione Prada in Tokyo, Lizzie Fitch and Ryan Trecartincontributed to this issue with a striking visual essay featuring stills from their latest film, TITLE WAIVE (2019–24) — a dynamic collage of moments, recorded over seven years on Fitch and Trecartin’s property in Ohio — along with archival images. Fitch and Trecartin have created a special visual piece for the cover.

 

Brett Ginsburg talks to Cusson Cheng about the nuances of his spatial choreographies. Together, they examine the ebb and flow of meaning in contemporary art, and the art of manipulating the viewer’s perspective through a transformative experience that resonates beyond the typical white cube space. For his cover story, Ginsburg was photographed by Luis Corzo in his studio in New York, wearing Stone Island.

 

Coumba Samba is profiled by Olivia Kan-Sperling for this issue, in an exploration of Samba’s multifaceted practice, which includes paintings, performance, and also music, to communicate raw emotion, many references, and life being compressed into something deceptively easy to consume. Samba appears on the cover photographed by Lengua in London, wearing Stefan Cooke and Kuboraum.

 

 

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Flash Art is an international quarterly magazine and publishing platform dedicated to contemporary art, exploring developments in the cultural landscape through the work of artists, writers, curators and various personalities from the art world. One of the oldest art magazines in Europe, Flash Art was founded in Rome in 1967 by the Italian art critic and publisher Giancarlo Politi, before moving to Milan in 1971. Originally published in Italian and English, the magazine was split into two publications in 1978 (Flash Art Italia and Flash Art International). Distributed worldwide, the magazine is one of the most widely read in its field and has become a benchmark in its field.